Amazon Taps AI to Sum Up User Product Reviews, Point Out Pros and Cons

14.08.2023 - 16:53 / pcmag.com / Ai

Amazon is starting to use ChatGPT-like AI technology to summarize user reviews.

It'll appear for "a subset of mobile shoppers in the US." The goal is to make it easier for consumers to quickly glean the pros and cons of an item.

“We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews, and with the recent advancements in generative AI, we believe we have the technical means to address this long-standing customer need,” Amazon said in Monday’s announcement. 

Amazon users can already get a sense of a product's quality by checking the number of stars it’s received. But to get a better idea of why the product is rated highly or not, you’ll need to sift through customer reviews, some of which number in the hundreds, if not thousands.

Amazon’s “AI-generated customer review highlights” tries to break down the reviews into one overall summary, in addition to several other summaries that can cover certain product attributes, such as “comfort,” “value,” and “condition.”

“For example, a customer looking to understand whether a product is easy to use can easily surface reviews mentioning ‘ease of use’ by tapping on that product attribute under the review highlights,” the company says. 

The same summary will also display a bar for the product attribute, indicating whether the overall sentiment is positive or negative. It’ll also surface quotes taken from several reviews to elaborate on the issue. Hence, the feature could make it easier for Amazon users to understand specific pros and cons of a product, beyond the mere 5-star review system.  

Amazon didn’t say what product categories it’s applying the generative AI tech to, but we spotted it across a variety of products, including laptops, video game peripherals, and food.

In its announcement, the company said: “We are always testing, learning, and fine-tuning our AI models to improve the customer experience and, based on customer feedback, may expand our review highlights feature to additional categories and customers in the coming months.”

The e-commerce giant is also well aware that fake review services could try to game the system, so the AI generated review highlights will only take content “from verified purchases.”

“We continue to invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews,” the company says. “This includes machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, including relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behavior.”

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